After The Ashes
by SapSorrow
Summary: Sequel to "Sound of Glass" and "Taste of Fire". This is the happy ever after.Enjoy. Pure Hayffie.
1. Chapter 1

**1.**

One morning he hears her singing the Hanging Tree song, her voice drifting up from outside on a cold autumn breeze. It is not the best singing voice in the world, certainly nowhere near as pretty as she thinks it is; but it is sweet and most of the notes and tune falls just about right and it makes him smile despite the hour.

Effie is a despicably early riser. She gave up trying to haul him out of bed with her long ago, and gave up lying around waiting for him not long after that. These days she just lets him wake up when he will – at least within reason. She takes the early hours of morning for herself, finding that she does in fact enjoy a little solitude when she knows it will not last. More often than not she comes back to bed to wake him later. She will sit beside him and poke him until he – quite literally – wakes up and smells the coffee. She makes amazing coffee actually, and he would even grudgingly admit to being a fan.

"The sage is finally growing," she says this morning, continuing on into a recital about the herb garden that he does not give nearly as much of a fuck about as he would like her to think. He's benign to it though, and smiles and nods, liking – though he never could have imagined _this_ in a thousand years – the sound of her voice and the up and down waves of sound lapping against his ears.

"Did you –" he begins to ask, inevitably, cutting her off half way through telling him about the state of the tomatoes.

"No Haymitch," she cuts in, archly, neatly segueing off topic in the knowledge of hat he is going to ask "I did not feed your stinky geese. You know how I feel about those creatures".

He knows damn well. Just as he knows that she _has_ fed the geese and let them out for the day. She pretends to hate them as she used to pretend to hate him, as she still does in fact; only nowadays, mercifully, she takes it out more on the geese than on him. He knows exactly how she feeds them too – at arm's length, more throwing the seed from a distance than sprinkling it.

"Of all the distasteful animals you could possibly have chosen –" she says and he grins at her and comes back with the same words to her whilst he tries to kiss her good morning and she pretends to find him as grim as his geese.

"I'm running next door," she announces – "And I hope to see you up and cleaning out the coop by the time I'm back with the bread".

Haymitch tries to suppress the urge to say _yes dear_ in the most eye rolling, brow beaten manner. This time he fails and she steals the bedsheet on her way out in retribution, utterly deaf to his yells. Anyway, he knows he has plenty of time, she'll get talking with Katniss and he'll have already sorted out the geese and snuck in a drink or two by the time she gets back.

Not that he drinks nearly as much these days. After persistent fights, ranging from light quibbling to enormous Trinket- tantrums that always ended with her saying that this time she really was leaving for good – they have come to an arrangement; he has an allowance, grudgingly given to him under Effie's careful watch, and in return he sticks to it.

She is still singing the same song coming round the corner from next door. He looks up when he hears her and smiles. She would never have acknowledged in words that she had even really been actively involved in the rebellion; indeed she always insisted that she was on their side purely because her people were. Him, Katniss, Peeta; that was what she meant, they were the only people she had. But he hears the lie when he hears her sing, there is air and earth and water in her voice when she sings, the false chirping of the Capitol songbird all melted away. He could breathe her in, this Effie; she is the sky made human, reachable, touchable, solid – though sometimes he thinks, only just.

Because he can never quite forget how nearly he might have lost her, how easily everything she was could have been stripped away by the things they did. She is a wonder to him now, for simply being Effie. He even treasures the silliness that still remains because he sees it more as a strength than anything else.

She is not like anything or anyone, a creature of two worlds, he supposed. He had never imagined she could adopt the District into her being and still remain herself. But she has; she is District truth walking arm in arm with Capitol lies. She expresses it as she expresses everything; more or less in the way she looks. This morning she has her hair tied back – it would be simply if not for the ridiculous green thing she has tied it back with. He does not even know what that is. There are layers of lace peeking out from below the hem of what should have been a drab district dress, but she dyed it pink anyway, because he supposed the word _drab_ would make her faint on the spot. He squints at her in the mellow autumn sunlight, wondering if her dress clashes dreadfully with the pink shawl or if, in some strange way, the combination actually works.

He supposes the fact that he is even giving this shit half a thought is proof that he has lived with her too long.

"Strange things," she announces to him, breaking off the song as she reaches him and speaking the words as though they were a news bulletin. "Have happened here, how stranger would it be – if we met at midnight in the hanging tree?"

She looks at him quizzically as though expecting a genuine answer. He shakes his head at her and wonders, not for the first time, if she went a little mad between districts and all the things that happened in them. If she did, he supposes it's as good a coping mechanism as any. But she hasn't, not really. She's just Effie. And though it's taken too long, he thinks he might finally have come to understand that this is one thing he can trust in all the world to stay the same and stay, if he dare think it and he does – _his._

She gives him a smile, with a little laugh in it, and walks blithely off towards the kitchen, waving the loaf over her head, announcing in a trilling voice –

"Bread!"

_x_

 **Hello! I'm so sorry for the wait on this third instalment! I wasn't entirely sure what to do with it since I had no plot as such, just a vague selection of ideas – so I've decided that rather than try and create a plot it's going to be just that – a series of fragments, peeps into Hayffie's happy ever after! Second peep coming soon! :-)**


	2. Chapter 2

**2.**

"Do I help?" she said. "Do I make anything better?"

She had been asking him it since he could remember; God, it had been years. At first he wished she would not- and not just at first, it was the longest time that he wished she would not. She wished it too, wished she could stop herself from asking, stop herself from seeking some kind of assurance that a part of her knew he would never give her. It was the logical part though; it was rational, organised Effie who made herself appear so untroubled by everything. That part knew he would never give her answer she would like and it did not care. It shrugged and flounced and left her lingering with the silly part of her that still sought something to cling to, that needed so desperately to be needed she thought at times she might go mad before she pushed that away too and just carried on.

The first time she asked had been on that first trip back to the Capitol. The trains had taken longer in those days and they had had almost a whole week to nit-pick at each other, to fight and sneer and fuck. It as in the aftermath of the latter that the questions she should not ask, should not even wonder, crept out of her, like demons tiptoeing across the bed he never quite threw her out of. It was less than five minutes after they were done and he was already staring up at the ceiling miserably again. That was when she had to ask –

"Do I help? _At all._ Do I make anything better or –" she did not know what the _or_ was, she did not really want to know. She just could not stand to see him so wretched all the damn time. But then, she did not go to his bed because she wanted to _help_ him anyway. She did not really know why she was asking.

He looked at her slowly then, and for a moment she thought he was thinking about it seriously; he seemed to frown, to regard her with something like fondness or at least consideration of her feelings before the look in his eyes closed off to her like a door slamming shut and he blinked.

"No," he said "Not really." He swung round to sit up on the side of the bed, back to her, bottle in hand.

"Do you really hate _everything?"_ she pressed, thinking back to a row they had had just that afternoon. He shrugged, did not quite laugh and breathed out the answer –

"Yeah."

" _Everything?_ Even me?"

He looked at her over his shoulder, grinning that humourless grin and for a moment something flickered very briefly in his eyes, that same faint hope that he might give a shit before it flickered out as quickly as it came.

"Especially, you sweetheart," he said, nodding; said it almost fondly in spite of the words themselves – "You most of all."

It was a lie, and just for a moment, something in his smirk had told her it was and she was young enough then to all but stick her tongue out with a comeback of –

"I don't like you either."

"Glad to hear it."

He was. It stopped him having to think about her fondly. He _had,_ just for a moment; there had been that swimming blue yearning in her eyes and her hair had fallen in a curious coil across her face and for a minute he had forgotten the hole his family had left in him. He could not forgive her that, when the moment had passed, and fucked her furiously for it, hating her or not.

-x-

She asked again as the years went on, always confounded as to why any expectation of a change in his answer remained in her. It never did. She would ask in those unguarded moments if she helped, the moments in between and just after and when he woke at night flailing and almost hitting her in the face in a panic. She would always find a way to calm him again, and, even though he _did_ relax against her in the end, sometimes she would still ask if she helped at all. He would always say _no, not even slightly, never, you're still asking?_ and she would freeze her heart out a fragment at a time each time she heard him say it.

It was easier, she supposed, to stay frozen. It made their day to day existence easier and by night – frozen tears could not run and dead things could not die. She supposed in a way he was helping her. Making it easier for her to stay detached. She could cut herself off until convinced her heart was as hard as his, and they would both never speak of what germinated beneath the lies.

 _Detached._ She sometimes thought, when she was at her most tired, _what a bloody joke._

-x-

She was not sure quite how long it had been after she had started really living in District Twelve. In fact she was never sure how to judge exactly when that was. In the first few weeks she had not settled down at all. They had swung between days of tentative happiness, days of a curious kind of joy and every third day more or less in which they had almost killed each other and she had headed to the train station to take her back to the Capitol. Some days she got as far as packing her bags. Some days she would get to the station and _not_ get on the train with great intent. Sometimes he came after her to talk her out of it _again._ Sometimes she talked herself out of it. Once she got halfway to The Capitol before getting off at the next stop and getting the next train back to Twelve. He would greet her when she got back to the house each time with a roll of the eyes and a tolerant half smile filled with volumes of genuine relief. He would ask her when exactly she planned to sort her shit out and she would have already asked herself the same question – albeit in different words – so many times that she was bored both of it and the answer that she did not know. She would just take whatever bottle he had been steadily drinking out of ever since she stormed out and pour it outside, claiming she hoped it killed the geese off. They would smile, tentatively, like young bloody lovers and the whole cycle would start again.

But eventually, maybe it was weeks, maybe months, nobody was quite sure, the days of leaving became less frequent and the good days went on for longer. When Effie did leave she would get less far before she turned back around and finally she stopped packing her bags altogether. For sure they were both always tentatively nervous she might do it again, even two years later it did not seem a certainty that she would stay forever. Still, one night in that first year he had woken up with the nightmares – less frequent than they had been it was true, and he was suspicious of this, always expecting them to come back in force – and there she was as she always was. She would feel her breathing flutter and panic and then after gradually slow as his did until they were both almost falling asleep. And then in the dark and the newfound calm she heard herself say –

"Do I help? Do I make anything better?"

Tentative feelings of hope and calm poked up in the dark like new shoots in the spring. He turned over, wrapped an arm around her, buried his face into her neck and after a breathless pause mumbled –

"Yeah. Yeah, sweetheart, you help."

_x_


	3. Chapter 3

Every day there were ways in which she surprised him, and every day it made him wonder how he still managed to be surprised.

If he was being perfectly honest with himself – and it wasn't always something he was good at – he had never expected her to stay. He could never have pictured her in this life, the _district_ life as she sometimes called it, in that way which made it sound like something nasty she had just stepped in. He _had_ imagined she would give up, and every time she said she was leaving, this time she was _really_ leaving – he believed her, far more than she ever believed herself. It was a surprise to him every time she came back and every time he yelled, "Fine then!" and slammed the door behind her it was in the real and true expectation that she wanted to leave him.

And yet at the same time he could never _quite_ believe in his heart that he was not going to see her again. It was a problem, and he wondered if it would take the rest of his life to figure it out.

When the rows came he blamed her, of course. It would always come up that he expected her to go, all of the - _you have no faith in me! What do I have to do? I may as well not bother!_ He could have said them all along with her, indeed in the instant before she said them. One time he did exactly that and it helped precisely nothing. She had just set her lips very thin, looked at him more than usually stonily and slammed the door _herself_ on the way out.

Afterwards he never left her alone about the time she forgot her manners so much as to actually _slam a door._ And every time she told him to shut up he would look affronted and come back reminding her that that wasn't very polite either. She could have slapped him for the number of time he chirped _manners!_ at her in his unfortunately passable imitation of a Capitol accent, made no better to her by the knowledge that he had picked it up from years of watching her.

He was so certain that his own uncertainty was going to ruin everything that he behaved like more of a dick than he would have done otherwise. The fact that he could see himself doing it and cringed to see it just made it worse.

But then, on the other hand, could _anybody_ have seen Effie Trinket, Capitol darling, adapting to the ways of a district in the aftermath of war. He shook his head so often at all the things he saw her do that were so completely not Effie. He would see her coming out of the woods with whatever she had been gathering, sunlight catching in her hair and her breath on the morning air. He would see her cleaning around him for the millionth time whilst he bathed in the wash of her voice; it was probably nagging him, but he was immune to it by now. He would see her feeding geese, watch her with Peeta learning to bake bread, fighting with him in the evening for sofa space – apparently the few inches he was allowed, perched precariously around her sprawling limbs, was not enough.

"I am not _sprawling,"_ she announced as though appalled that she would do something so vulgar, even as she stretched out to the full extent of the sofa – "I am _reclining"._ He would sigh and shake his head and leave her to recline.

He would watch her with a mix of fondness, caution and gentle pride that confused him. Every strange little thing she did that struck him as _not Effie_ bewildered and delighted him. But it was a cautious, worried delight as he wondered how long he could really keep her. That she might stay forever frightened him almost as much as the idea of her leaving. At least, he convinced himself it did. Even in the relative safety under which they now lived the idea that they could really be happy clashed inside him so much it was almost sobering. Almost.

He thought about it more than he would have ever let her know. When she saw him looking her way she would usually just sigh and smile and ask him if he didn't have something useful he should be doing. He probably did; but all the little things he had never had time to observe in her before intrigued him now and stopping to watch was perhaps the closest to peace he would allow himself. Before, it had always been a case of cramming as much as they could into the time available to them; whilst at the same time feeling guilty about taking any pleasure out of that time because it inevitably meant another two dead tributes. But now he could watch her smile to the end of that smile and not have to look away for fear of – he was not sure what, if it was the guilt of wanting to smile back or the useless hope that he could stay as unattached as he wanted to be. He could watch the way her fingers stopped moving until it went beyond affection and annoyed him all over again. He could even watch her morning routine; that transformation from perfection to ridiculousness that she would never let anybody else be party to. He made the mistake of describing it that way to her once and obviously she took umbrage rather than the compliment it was supposed – in some sort of way- to be. She said _She_ was perfection and he the ridiculousness and he supposed he should have seen that coming.

Then there were the new routines: getting up before he did and making coffee, awkwardly feeding the geese, going down to the market that had set up where the old hob had been and haggling with the vendors before they were awake enough to deal with her – for someone who had been brought up to riches she was ridiculously good at the latter. These puzzled him at first with their un- Effie- ness; at least until he thought it through. Organising, business, efficiency – when he turned it over it was all _exactly_ like Effie.

And then simply living, _surviving,_ getting through each day as she woke to it – that had always been the epitome of Effie. They were all survivors now; and watching her and knowing it, for the first time, he grudgingly supposed; he was starting to feel some sense of pride in it. He could not have done before, without her.

One day he might even break and admit to her a little part of all the things he could never have managed without her, but he was perhaps not quite there. Not yet.

_x_


End file.
